This insight published in cooperation with Uprinting.com – read, be informed and GROW your business.

Small business owners have been focused on online marketing in recent years, but traditional marketing concepts are still as important as ever.

Sure online marketing is low cost, easy to track and can be started for very little investment.

However, online marketing can have a bigger impact when enhanced by word of mouth and print, television, and radio ads.

But for most small businesses, funds are limited.

For this reason, many small business owners choose printing services like UPrinting.com for vivid, professional-looking printed collateral that make your marketing material SIZZLE and GRAB ATTENTION.

It’s important, that your printed marketing campaign act as an enhancement to your online marketing to get the most bang for the buck. Here are a few ways UPrinting can help boost your marketing efforts, in particular we focus on booklet printing:

Provide “takeaway” materials. Most small business owners are always on the move. Whether you’re meeting with potential clients or presenting to a roomful of colleagues at a conference, a booklet can make a much more lasting impression than printouts of a PowerPoint presentation. Additionally, you’ll be giving your audience something to take with them and review later.

Better target your audience. Each marketing campaign should be specifically geared toward your target customer base. For businesses that provide services or products to college students, for instance, a booklet can provide stacks of materials that can be displayed around campus.

Provide information without overwhelming. Many customers avoid direct sales pitches. By utilizing a booklet, your small business can hand over the information in a well-designed, informative format that gives customers everything they’d need to know. They then will read the information on their own terms.

Interact with customers. As great as social networking is for reaching large groups of people inexpensively, it lacks one major component: human interaction. While a booklet printing will not, in itself, allow you to interact with customers, presumably you’ll be distributing it to customers standing directly in front of you. This gives you an invaluable opportunity to engage the customer and create a dialogue that will possibly continue online.

Reach every customer. Believe it or not, there are still people without internet access. Sure, they are a small group, but even among those who are regularly online, it may not be an option all the time. UPrinting booklet printing provides paper-based marketing materials that can be read anywhere. In fact, if your readers are away from an internet connection, your booklet may become handy reading material.

Proven success. Study after study proves traditional marketing still has a place in today’s business world. But online marketing has a place, as well. It’s important not to dismiss one in favor of the other. By operating both traditional and online marketing efforts in tandem, you’ll be able to maximize your reach.

When preparing your UPrinting booklet printing job, be sure to include information about your online presence, including URLs for your social media sites, your website, and your YouTube channel. This is a great opportunity to gather followers who might not have found you online.

It’s worthy to note that in some parts of the world, like in Nigeria, traditional marketing still plays a prominent role. The culture of online marketing, though in use, still cannot compare with a printed booklet in ones hand, a TV commercial or a gigantic billboard. Most people in these parts don’t use the internet that much (though mobile internet use is on the rise) and really have not adopted social media as a credible source of business talk-less of profits!

Social media is still catching on and for now isn’t yet seen as a serious marketing tool for majority of businesses in Africa especially the older bigger organisations. This in part can be attributed to the lack of infrastructure for seamless high-speed internet connections and where this is available it would come with a high cost to the business.

I must add also that small businesses or start-ups run by young entrepreneurs are the ones mostly taking on social media as a serious marketing tool due to its low cost as you rightly mentioned.